Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to electronic meeting management, and, in particular, to a system and method for managing electronic meetings such that resource contention is mitigated.
Description of Related Art
Physical meeting rooms are sometimes used for back-to-back meetings. In this situation, people often mill around as one meeting is winding down and participants of the next meeting start arriving. In the real physical world, participants themselves figure out in an ad hoc manner what to do, potentially leading to awkward situations with participants of the second meeting unintentionally barging into the first meeting, or intentionally barging into the first meeting with the purpose of hastening the end of the first meeting.
A similar resource contention exists for virtual and/or electronic conferences (generically, “electronic conferences”). Often before a start of an electronic conference, participants are put into a state of limbo, and the entrance and/or departure of participants who may have back-to-back meetings is not elegantly managed, causing potential overlap of the meetings. For example, participants of back-to-back meetings using a same conference code may intermingle by mistake. Alternatively, while waiting for a moderator to activate a conference, participants are subject to wasted dead time (e.g., listening to music) prior to the meeting, which could be used for a more productive purpose.
One solution of the background art is to allocate separate resources for separate meetings. A host may use two separate bridges with different access codes for back-to-back meetings. The separate bridge acts as a holding place (i.e., a virtual waiting room or virtual lobby, etc.) for participants that are not yet allowed to join a session. Items of relevance to a meeting, such as documents, slide presentations, would be distributed to participants as attachments to a meeting invitation or related emails. Alternatively, a sharable storage location (e.g., a sharepoint) can be set up to store documents for the meeting.
Early virtual environment systems, built upon multimedia conferencing technology of the time, such as “PERSYST” (a virtual room platform and distance-learning environment), and the “Virtual Jazz Club,” a.k.a. “VJC” (a session-based synchronous social network allowing end-users share multimedia streams), displayed a 2D representation of rooms and hallways and lobbies with shared display and audio and representations of participants. The VJC representation was partitioned into separate conversations (e.g., at virtual tables), with an ability to browse, be invited, join, make private, and so forth. What a participant heard was based on their level of participation and permissions.
Upon entering the environment in PERSYST, a user is placed a school hallway with “doors” to various virtual classrooms. Only virtual classrooms that were accessible to the user would be displayed. When it was appropriate (e.g., class about to begin, or class was in session), the virtual classroom doors would open to grant access to the virtual classrooms. Virtual classrooms not presently in use could be entered in order to browse through lecture notes, etc. The virtual classrooms were persistent places. A virtual classroom in session was similar to a multimedia conference with shared voice, video, documents, etc. In the Virtual Jazz Club users would first be presented with a room with individual tables, with each table representing a communication session. Some communication session could be completely private, other communication sessions could be “overheard” and the participants being displayed. A user could join a session only if a “chair” was available.
Some known systems such as the Avaya™ Web.alive™ virtual environment provide visual and spatial cues to enable participants to manage entering and leaving meeting rooms at the right time, just as they might in the real world. For example, if the room (physical or virtual) is still in use, participants or their avatars may wait outside or in a physical or virtual waiting room or lobby area. Facilitators may be present in either the physical or virtual world. A physical or virtual room may be stocked with materials related to the meeting. Access to a room may be locked until an appropriate time for conference participants to enter. Such virtual systems rely on the social actions of each participant to manage themselves, just as they would in the real world. Mistakes can still occur in the known virtual systems, just as they do in the real world, with people walking into a meeting room which another meeting is wrapping up.
Virtual world managers such as the Avaya™ Web.alive™ are able to manage what and how multimedia services and content are shared by participants. The virtual world manager may have lobbies and open places as well as closed and “locked” places designated for different meetings with human moderators and access codes.
In some systems of the known art that are usable with call centers, such as U.S. Pat. No. 7,336,779, a call center call queue may be used as a virtual holding room. For example, there may be created, identified and implemented multi-customer sessions, such that callers in a queue are bridged together in order to chat as the callers wait for an available service agent. For example, callers may be in queue waiting to speak to an agent. While the callers are waiting for their “session” with an agent to begin, a system can determine like interests and bridge various people together (to talk, IM chat, etc.) at the same time the callers are updated with information, such as: when their session will begin; identifying other sessions that might be of interest (e.g., a product training session that may be of interest to all users in the queue who own the same product, etc.); and so forth. These users may select to delay their interaction with an agent, and move down in the queue as they are engaged in this other activity. An agent with a different skill level is assigned to manage these group chats, and the agent's availability is used to schedule the group chats, for instance a user may be asked whether a training session can start in three minutes and whether the user would you like to join the training session. In another example, a voice chat could be arranged such that the agent can speak and hear everyone, but each participant would only hear the agent, or alternatively hear everyone.
In some systems of the known art that are usable with call centers, such as U.S. Pat. No. 7,415,417, a caller entering a queue is assigned a virtual agent that can gather more information, convey interesting information, and manage communication sessions while the caller is waiting. Callers may be grouped together based on various criteria and are granted access to resources and enabled to interact over different channels.
However, the known art does not fully determine and use contextual information in order to automatically manage the participants of an electronic conference, their access to services, their ability to interact with each other, in new ways; as well as using contextual information to interact directly with participants. Therefore, a need exists to provide access to and use of contextual information, in order to provide improved interactions associated with electronic conferences, and ultimately improved customer satisfaction.